A Piedmont pilot told me a story years ago about a hillbilly 737 short field landing technique where the speedbrake handle was fully deployed before touchdown on landing and when weight on wheels was sensed, the ground spoilers would come up without delay. I do remember that the flight spoilers on the 737 were said to give more noise than drag compared to the effective 727 inflight spoilers.
When Piedmont got the 737-300 the ground spoiler deployment lockout was done by radar altitude and a crew found out the hard way when they used the speedbrake handle down before landing technique. The ground spoilers came up at 20 feet RA or whatever and hard landing was made.
Valujet had a ground-air sensing problem on a DC-9 in 1996. To allow gear retraction and pressurization after takeoff a circuit breaker was pulled in an ad hoc workaround to force the air mode of the systems. On approach the breaker was pushed back in to depressurize, the ground spoilers came up and the plane settled into the approach lights. This time they made it around for a landing but with major damage.